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Macaroni a LA Creme

A macaroni dish served with a creamy sauce of milk, butter, flour, cream, and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Macaroni a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in plenty of salted hot water until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the milk until it boils.

  2. Stir the butter and flour mixture into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the cream, white pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste.

  4. Mix in the grated cheese according to your preference.

Serve

  1. Drain the macaroni and place it on a serving dish.

  2. Pour the boiling sauce over the macaroni and serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it a tender, starchy base for the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavor, with flour to form a thickening roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce that clings to the pasta.
Milk
Forms the body of the sauce, thickened by the flour and butter mixture.
Grated cheese
Melts into the sauce, adding richness, savory flavor and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the boiling milk. Adding the flour mixture to boiling liquid without enough stirring can leave lumps. Constant whisking disperses the starch so it thickens the sauce smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, cream, pepper, cheese):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, cream, pepper, cheese. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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